When the history of higher education’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic is written, Jerry Falwell Jr. might make a cameo as the guy who said everybody else had it wrong. The president of Liberty University, son of the late evangelical leader, and staunch supporter of President Trump, assumed the role of contrarian, welcoming students back to the university’s residential campus, in Lynchburg, Va., when other institutions were pleading with students to disperse.
Falwell, who fancies himself as higher education’s outsider, at once rejects and embraces this narrative. He insists that Liberty responded to the pandemic just as many other institutions did, moving to online instruction while allowing students to finish the semester in dormitories if they chose to do so. At the same time, however, Falwell has admonished universities that, he said, closed up shop and decided to “push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers.”
The truth is, Liberty’s approach to Covid-19 differed in substance and style from that of many colleges. While plenty of institutions made accommodations for students who had no housing alternatives, they also strongly encouraged students to leave campus and locked up academic buildings. Liberty, on the other hand, was explicit in its message that students were free to return to campus. Even after moving to mostly online instruction, the university maintained several classes in person, only closing its aviation program after a gubernatorial order required Liberty to do so.
When Liberty wrapped up the academic year this month, Falwell trumpeted the university’s “strong” finish, skewering the news media for what he described as misleading reports about possible infections of students and employees. He’s now seeing some coverage from conservative news outlets that he likes better, including a column in The Wall Street Journal that began, “How it must hurt to have to admit: Jerry Falwell Jr. was right.”
The Chronicle caught up with Falwell by cellphone on Friday as he was driving through the mountains of Virginia with sometimes-patchy reception. He dished (briefly) about a recent conversation with President Trump; talked about why he never wears a mask; and appeared to flirt with a conspiracy theory about the origins of the pandemic. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve become a little bit of a lightning rod in this. What do you make of that?
It’s kind of interesting, because we didn’t do anything differently than Arizona State, USC, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech. Over spring break, Virginia’s governor ruled you can’t have gatherings of more than 10 people. So we made the decision to go to a complete online format.
I don’t trust this governor. I don’t trust his motives. I don’t trust that his decisions are completely based on public health.
On a campus built for 16,000, we had about 1,200 return, and by the end of the semester it was down to 900. It looked like a ghost town. All the restaurants went to take-out. We told the RAs to enforce social distancing. We put up “no trespassing” signs to keep anybody from the local community off campus. That was the biggest danger we saw. The only people that we know that trespassed were The New York Times.
[Liberty’s communications with students differed sharply from that of other universities, including Virginia Tech, where the dean of students advised: “If you have the option not to return to Blacksburg, please take it.” But Falwell says it is “splitting hairs” to describe Liberty’s approach as different, because many universities had similar percentages of students return to on-campus housing. At Liberty, about 15 percent of the campus’s residential population initially returned; at Virginia Tech, it was less than 10 percent, the university said at the time.]
In March, when a lot of colleges were starting to announce they were going online only, you were talking about staying open — and you suggested there had been an overreaction to the virus.
That’s because the governor had not ordered that we could have classroom sizes of no more than 100 people yet. I was not going to deprive the students of coming back and getting what they’d paid for in the format that they paid for until I had to by law. If you want to call that a distinction from other universities, that was a distinction.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
I don’t trust this governor. I don’t trust his motives. I don’t trust that his decisions are completely based on public health. Just like a lot of other blue-state governors, I think their motives are to cause economic upheaval, and bailouts, a stimulus, all that stuff. So I was going to wait until he said we had to stop in-person instruction before I did it.
There was some tension in the local community about Liberty’s approach. The mayor described it as “reckless.” To what do you attribute that?
It’s all political. Virginia Tech had close to 1,000 students at one point. Theirs dropped, too. But it was just all political.
Virginia Tech said they had fewer than 500 students on campus.
They ended up at 500, but they were at 900 when spring break ended — 950, I believe. It dwindled down as they kept paying kids more to go home. At least that’s what I was told. That’s second hand.
[Michael Stowe, a Virginia Tech spokesman, told The Chronicle that rebates offered to students were designed to “reduce the campus population in the interest of public health.”]
When the mayor of Lynchburg calls you ”reckless,” you’re saying you think that’s a political statement?
Oh, absolutely. When that New York Times article ran, they must have gotten heat from local people, who were worried that I was bringing a bunch of kids back with Covid, because the New YorkTimes lied about it. So, they got all holier than thou about it.
It turns out there were cases in the city, and we had to fight to keep them off our campus. But we ended up with zero.
[On March 29, the Times reported that nearly a dozen Liberty students were “sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19,” citing an interview with a doctor who works with Liberty. The university disputed the article, saying the doctor had denied ever telling the newspaper what it reported. The Times has not issued a correction. On Friday, Lynchburg prosecutors announced that they would not pursue criminal charges against journalists
from the Times and ProPublica, whom Liberty had accused of trespassing while reporting on the university’s coronavirus response. Falwell said he was satisfied with statements from the journalists, who acknowledged that the university had posted “no trespassing” signs on campus.]
The statement you put out at the end of the semester says, “The only Covid cases in the university community were employees working from home or offices off-campus.” So how many cases were there in the university community?
There’s two or three that I know of, but none of them were on campus.
[Five people affiliated with Liberty tested positive: Four employees and one local student who was taking online classes, Falwell later said in an email]
There was some reporting early on that professors had been told to come to campus and hold office hours and conduct their online classes from their offices.
We had decided that professors could come in and have office hours, and then said, OK, fine: Anybody that feels like they’re at risk, any faculty member, can work from home.
Why not just say, Don’t come in?
That’s up to them. If they get bored, they want to come sit in their office with nobody around, who cares? People should be free to go to work where they want to work, as long as they don’t break any of the governor’s orders.
Are you going in to your office?
I don’t have as many meetings as I used to, but whenever I do need to have one, yes, I’ll go in and have one.
Do you wear a mask?
No.
Do you ever wear one?
No.
Why not?
I don’t get close enough to anybody to need one. I got the antibody test, and I have not had Covid-19.
[The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing a mask “in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”]
You got the antibody test because you felt you had symptoms, or you were just wondering if you’d won the Covid lottery and might be immune?
I was just curious. I kept hearing so much hype about it; I just wanted to see how real the threat was.
The fact that you didn’t have the antibodies, does that make you think that the threat is exaggerated?
No, I’m just glad to see it wasn’t bad enough around here that I’d caught it.
[Of 31,140 reported coronavirus cases in Virginia, 74 are in Lynchburg, where Liberty’s main campus is.]
Recently, Vice President Mike Pence held a conversation with some higher-ed leaders. I was a little surprised not to see you among them. Did you know that was going on?
I really don’t insert myself into things like that any more than I have to.
A lot of schools are rushing, they’re seeing who can announce first that they’re going to reopen, because there’s a little bit of financial desperation going on that doesn’t exist at Liberty. They have to have the students to keep the bills paid. We don’t.
When do you think you will have to make a decision about the fall?
Whenever I want to. Whenever I decide that the powers-that-be have concluded that it’s safe to open, then I’ll make the call. But not until then; I don’t have to. There’s no pressure.
We’re giving faculty their contracts, but we are making them contingent on enrollment levels. And there’s a chance a lot of kids won’t come back because parents are scared to send them back. So we’re going to keep our options open.
[Liberty professors do not have tenure, except in the law school, where accreditation requires it. The university has a $1.6 billion endowment, and it boasts an enrollment of 100,000 online students ].
The interview you gave to Fox News on March 13 is part of what drew a ton of attention to Liberty. You were saying at the time that you felt like people were overreacting to the virus. At that point, there were about 2,200 cases. Now we’re at 1.4 million. Do you still think people were overreacting then? Are they now?
Anthony Fauci, [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], or somebody – I don’t know if it was a governor — there were people in positions of power saying it was not anything to worry about. They were letting people go on cruises, still, after I said that. I was just one of many who felt that way at that time.
[On March 11, Fauci told a congressional hearing, “The bottom line: It is going to get worse.” He advised that large gatherings across the nation should be canceled.]
Have you had any direct conversations with President Trump since this pandemic began?
Yeah, he called yesterday. I was sitting in the car, and the phone number popped up and I didn’t recognize it and I answered it: “Jerry,” the president said.
I can’t tell you what he said, but it was just a friendly conversation.
I told him about what we were planning to do with The New York Times about the trespassing charges, and he said, “I hear that people are dying at Liberty. Now I hear there’s zero cases. He said, “Why don’t they correct it?” I said, “Good question.”
What did he think of how you were handling The New York Times?
I never say what the president says to me.
You just did!
Not really.
Fair enough. In your Fox interview, you were floating the idea that North Korea and China might have created the virus. There’s been criticism that there’s just no evidence for this, that this is conspiratorial thinking. Was it appropriate to voice that out loud?
Afterward, everybody else started saying the same thing. I was ahead of the game on that one.
It’s funny: A lot of Ivy League schools have connections to that Wuhan lab. I don’t know if you’ve heard that. I don’t know if they’re working over there. I just read last week there’s some connection between Ivy League schools and that Wuhan lab. I don’t know if that means anything.
If I didn’t know better, I would think you were planting a seed that Ivy League universities are part of some conspiracy to release the coronavirus. Is that what you’re saying?
No, no, no. I was just surprised to read that they were involved with that lab.
This is the exact kind of stuff that people complain about with you: Just floating the ‘isn’t this curious?’ type of thing. Now you’ve added Ivy League universities to the list, as if they’re part of some problem.
That was published in the mainstream media. They did it to raise suspicion. I didn’t. I was just telling you what they said.
[Scientists have said they doubt the new coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan. But the theory remains resonant in political circles. In response to follow-up questions about Ivy League connections to the Wuhan lab, Falwell provided an article from Bloomberg about a Harvard University chemistry professor who had been arrested in a crackdown on intellectual-property theft sponsored by China. There is no evidence that Charles M. Leiber, the professor, had anything to do with the novel coronavirus, despite social-media posts suggesting otherwise, FactCheck.org reported in February. The Chronicle provided Falwell with a link to FactCheck.org’s reporting on Leiber. “Interesting,” Falwell replied].
How would you feel if you opened Liberty and you had a student or faculty member who got really sick, or even died? Would you feel tremendous guilt?
That’s why I said I’m going to exercise extreme caution before making decisions. You weigh all the factors, and you make the risk known, and it’s their choice whether to come. I don’t see how that’s any different than going on a ski slope in the state of Virginia.
But I wouldn’t open school and say we recommend you come if this thing’s still going like it is now. You’re welcome to come, but please realize that we can’t control what we can’t control.
I wouldn’t care how many showed up and how many didn’t. A lot of schools would.
Because you have so much money.
If you want to put it that way [laughing]. I didn’t say that; you did.
You’ve kind of been saying it.
We don’t have the financial pressures that a lot of schools have.
For once, you’re being more diplomatic than me.
Yes [laughing].
[In a later text to The Chronicle, Falwell said, “the other reason” he didn’t care if students decided not to come back to campus in the fall is because Liberty could provide the same academic quality online as in person.]